Coalescent dc-1

by Stephen Baxter

  And few of them talked. Oddly, it took me a while to notice that. But there was little of the incessant chatter of Level 1. Here, there were words exchanged, brief conversations, but no hubbub. It was, I thought, as if words weren’t really needed here.

  It struck me that I had already come deeper than most members of the public, like the schoolchildren in their classrooms above, would ever reach. Nobody would see this — nobody but another member of the Order — and to her, who had grown up with it, none of this would seem strange at all.

  And the air was thicker, warmer, and more redolent with that earthy animal musk. I soon felt breathless; my chest strained as I breathed, my lungs ached. After a time I began to feel sleepy, and I had a vague sense of the Crypt and its inhabitants swimming past me, as if I were in a waking dream.

  I struggled to think.

  “Most people born in the Crypt stay here. Is that true?”

  “Not all,” Rosa said. She talked about how people would be sent “outside,” for a day, a month, even years, during their education, or as part of their work. “Like Lucia. And some leave for good, like our own grandmother—”

  “Grannie?”

  “She was born here, but died in Manchester. You didn’t know that, did you? How do you think families like ours, branches of Regina’s ancient clan, end up in England, or America, or elsewhere? Of course people leave — they always have — sometimes for good. But they retain a loyalty to the Order.” She smiled. “It’s our shared heritage, after all.”

  There was a lot I never learned about the Order — how they allocated their children surnames, for instance. I wondered vaguely how babies born here were formally registered, whether the Order had some tame functionary in Rome’s registry of births and deaths. Perhaps some of them grew up here without any official record at all, never leaving the Crypt, living and dying invisible to the state.

  Rosa brought me to a kind of open oven, a brick-lined niche in the wall taller than I was. I lingered, curious. A wide chimney snaked up out of sight, caked with soot. There was no fire burning. This was very old — I recognized narrow Empire-era red bricks, the thick-packed mortar between them.

  “So what’s this, a barbecue?”

  Rosa smiled. “Part of our ventilation system. Or it was. Nowadays we have modern air-conditioning equipment — ducts, pumps, fans, dehumidifiers, even carbon dioxide scrubbers. But that kind of gear has only become available in the last few decades or so. In the eighteenth century we did buy one of James Watt’s first steam engines, but that was deinstalled and sold off to a museum long ago … The very first builders, digging down from the Catacombs, adapted techniques used in the deep mines. You’d light a fire under here and keep it burning, all day.” She pointed upward. “The smoke and heat would rise up the chimney — and, rising, would draw air through the Crypt. Elsewhere there are vents to allow more air in. Sometimes they would work bellows.”

  “So you’d get a circulation. Ingenious.”

  “In case of problems with the airflow, the Order members would have to block a corridor or passageway.”

  “With what?”

  “With their bodies, of course. They’d just run to where the problem was. It sounds crude, but it worked very well.”

  “Who told them what to do?”

  She seemed puzzled by the question. “Why, nobody. You’d look around, see there was a problem, follow your neighbors, do what they were doing. Just as if you were putting out a fire. You don’t need to be told to do that, do you? You just do it …”

  I had no reason to disbelieve her. I had still seen no senior management floor, no corner offices for the Big Cheeses, no evidence of a chain of command. Evidently things just worked, the way Rosa had described.

  She was still talking about the ventilation system. She slapped the solid brick wall. “The old infrastructure is still there. Always will be. Even now — though we have our own generators, like a hospital, independent of the public supply — we prepare for power outages. The youngsters are still taught about the old ways, given simple drills. If the very worst happened, we could always revert to the old methods.”

  I peered at the ancient brickwork. “The very worst? …”

  “If everything fell apart. If there was no more power at all.”

  That took me aback. “You’re planning for how to keep the air supply functioning, even if civilization falls. ”

  “Not planning, exactly. There are few plans here, George. But — well, we’re here for the long term. And you read Regina’s story. Civilizations do sometimes inconveniently fall …”

  We walked on, down the crowded corridor. She led me away from the ancient hearth, down further staircases — some of them metal, some of them older, cut from the stone itself — staircases that led ever deeper into the core of the Crypt.

  We reached Level 3, the deepest downbelow of all.

  * * *

  Many of the walls here were bare rock, polished so smooth by the passage of bodies they gleamed. It was clearly very old — and yet this level, the deepest, was paradoxically the youngest of this great inverted city.

  The corridors here were still narrower than those above. They branched as we walked, until once again I had completely lost my bearings. The air was hot, moist, and thick, and was at first suffocatingly hard to breathe. Carbon dioxide is heavy, I remembered dimly, and it must pool, here at the bottom of the great chamber of the Crypt. But as my body became accustomed to the conditions the viselike pain that gripped my chest eased.

  And everywhere we walked we had to push through the endless crowds, the smoky gray eyes huge in the gloom. Nobody spoke, here on Level 3. They just moved wordlessly around each other, on their way through the endlessly branching corridors. The only sounds were the rustle of their soft-soled shoes on the rocky floor, and the steady flow of their breathing — and even that, it seemed to me, was synchronized, coming in overlapping waves of whispers, like the lapping of an invisible ocean. I had the sense of these soft, rounded little creatures all around me, in the corridors that stretched off into the darkness every direction I looked, and of thousands more in the tremendous airy superstructure of galleries and corridors and chambers above me.

  As I describe it now it sounds oppressive, claustrophobic. But it did not feel like that at the time.

  Rosa seemed to sense that. “You belong here, George,” she said softly. “I’m your sister, remember. If it’s good enough for me … Can’t you feel the calm in here? …”

  I felt the need to cut through this odd seduction. “What about sex?”

  “What about it?”

  “You’ve a lot of young people here, cooped up together. There must be love affairs — casual flings—” I felt awkward; trying to discuss such issues with my long-lost sister, I was reaching for fifties euphemisms. “Do you let people screw?”

  She stared at me in icy disapproval. “First of all,” she said, “it isn’t a question of ‘letting’ people do anything. There is nobody to ‘let’ you, or to stop you come to that. People just know how to behave.”

  “How? Who teaches them?”

  “Who teaches you to breathe? … And anyhow it tends not to be an issue. Most of the men here are gay. Or don’t have an inclination either way. Others usually leave.” She said this as if it were the most usual setup in the world.

  It might fit in. Peter, in his long, rambling analyses of what we had learned about the Order, had speculated it might be some kind of heredity cult. Like neuter women, like Pina, gay men could help out with the raising of the fecund ones, the Lucias. But neither class would be any threat to the precious gene pool, because they didn’t contribute to it.

  “Okay, but — Rosa, how come most of the people here are women?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “Because most people born here are female.”

  “Yes, but how? Some kind of genetic engineering? … But you were around a long time before anybody even conceived of the notion of a gene. So how do you manage it? Wha
t do you do with the excess boys? Do you do what the Spartans did with their baby girls?—”

  She stopped and glared at me, suddenly as angry as I had seen her. “We don’t murder here, George. This is a place that gives life, not death.” It was as if I had insulted somebody she loved — as, perhaps, I had.

  “Then how?”

  “There are more girls than boys. It just happens. You ask a lot of questions, George. But in the Crypt we don’t like questions.”

  “Ignorance is strength.”

  She glared at me. “If you really understood that, you would understand everything.” She walked on, but her gait was stiff, her shoulders hunched.

  We came to an alcove, cut into the rock. Before it a little shrine had been set up, a kind of altar carved of pale marble. Slender pillars no more than three feet tall supported a roof of finely shaped stone. A glass plate had been fixed before it. Rosa paused here, and looked on reverently.

  “What’s this?”

  “A most precious place,” she said. “George, Regina herself built this, fifteen centuries ago. It has been rebuilt several times since — this level didn’t even exist for centuries after Regina’s death — but always exactly as she had intended it. And what it contains, she brought from home … Take a look inside.”

  I crouched and peered. I saw three little statues, standing in a row. They looked like grumpy old women wearing duffel coats. The statues were poorly made, lumpy and with grotesque faces; they weren’t even identical. But they were very ancient, I saw, worn by much handling.

  Rosa said, “The Romans used to believe that each household had its own gods. And these were Regina’s family gods — our gods. She preserved them through the fall of Britain, and her own extraordinary troubles, and brought them all the way to Rome. And here the matres have stayed ever since, as have Regina’s descendants. So you see, this is our home, mine and yours. Not Manchester, not even Britain. This is why we belong here, because this is where our deepest roots go down into the earth. This is where our family gods are …”

  All part of the sales pitch, I told myself. And yet I was impressed, even touched. Rosa made a kind of genuflection before moving on.

  A way farther on, we came to a doorway.

  It was a big room — I strained to see — but it had the atmosphere of an old people’s rest home. A series of large chairs had been set out in the musty dark. The chairs looked elaborate, as if packed with medical equipment. Figures reclined in the chairs. Attendants moved silently back and forth, nurses perhaps, but wearing the bland smock uniforms of the Order. Most of the “patients” wore blankets over their legs, or over their whole bodies, and drips had been set up beside two of them. The faces of the women in the chairs looked caved in, old. But I could see bulges over the bellies of several of them, bulges that looked like nothing so much as pregnancy.

  In one of the chairs, far from the door, a woman was sitting up. She looked younger, and her hair looked blond, not gray. Something about the shape of her face reminded me of Lucia. But she was too far away for me to see clearly, and an attendant came to her and pressed something to her neck, and the woman subsided back into silence.

  “A hundred years old, and still fertile …” Rosa murmured.

  It was all just as Peter and I had put together from the garbled accounts of Lucia and Daniel. But even so, standing here, confronted by the almost absurd reality of it, it was all but impossible to believe.

  She squeezed my hand, hard enough to hurt. She led me farther on; her fingers were strong and dry.

  We approached another doorway, cut into the rock. Light poured out, comparatively bright, and I heard a noise, chattering, high-pitched, and continuous, like seagulls on a rock.

  There were babies in here. They were all very young, no more than a few months old. The walls were painted bright primary colors, and the rock floor was covered by a soft rubber matting, on which lay the babies — all pale, all wispy-haired, all with blank gray eyes — so many I couldn’t even count them. The air in the room was hot, dense, moist, laden with sweet infant smells of milk and baby shit. As I gazed in at this the women of the Order pressed around me as they always did, warm and oddly sweet-scented themselves; a part of me wanted to struggle, as if I were drowning.

  “From our oldest inhabitants,” said Rosa dryly, “to our youngest.”

  “It’s all true, isn’t it, Rosa?” I asked her with cold dread. “Just as Lucia said. You turn young girls into old witches and keep them alive, keep them pumping out clutches of kids every year, until they’re a hundred …”

  She just ignored me. “You never had children, George. Well, neither did I. We have our nephews, I suppose, out in Miami Beach. I’ve never even seen them …” Her hand tightened on mine, and her voice was insistent, compelling. It was almost as if I were talking to myself. “You never meant to be childless, did you? But you never found the right woman — not even the girl you married — never managed to create the right environment around yourself, never found a place you felt comfortable. And the years went by … No kids. How does that make you feel? Our little lives are brief and futile. Nothing we build lasts — not in the long run — not stone temples or statues, not even empires. But our genes endure — our genes are a billion years old already — and they will live forever, if we pass them on.”

  “It’s too late for you,” I said brutally.

  She flinched. But she said, “No, it isn’t. It’s never too late for any of us — not here.

  “Look at these children, George. None of them are my own. But they are all — cousins. Nieces, nephews. And that’s the reason I will always stay here. Because this is my family. My way of beating death.” Her face seemed to float before me in the gloom, intense, like a distorted reflection of my own in smoky glass. “And it can be yours.”

  At first I didn’t understand. “Through nieces and nephews?”

  She smiled. “For you, there might be more than that. George, every child needs a father — even here. But you want the father of your nieces to be strong, smart, capable: you want the best blood you can find. It’s best if the fathers come from the family, as long as they are remote enough genetically — and the family is so big now that’s no problem …”

  She was finally getting to the point, I realized uneasily.

  “George, you’re one of us. And you’ve shown yourself to be smart — resilient — decent, too, in your impulse to find me — even in your attempt to help Lucia, misguided though it was.”

  I tried to think through what she was saying. “What are you offering me? Sex?”

  Rosa laughed. “Well, yes. But more. Family, George. That’s what I’m offering you. Immortality. You came looking for me, looking for family. Well, you found both. A true family — not that flawed, sad little bunch we were in Manchester.”

  I could stay here, that was what Rosa was telling me. I could become part of this. Like Lucia’s Giuliano, I thought. And by submitting myself as a stud — it seems laughable, but what else could you call it? — I would find a way for my heritage to live on.

  For a moment I didn’t trust myself to speak. But none of this seemed strange or disturbing. On the contrary, it seemed the most attractive offer in the world.

  My cell phone trilled. It was a bright, clean, modern sound that seemed to cut through the murk of blood and milk that filled the air.

  * * *

  I pulled my hand away from Rosa. I dug out the phone, and raised it to my face. The screen was a tiny scrap of plastic, backlit with green, that glowed bright as a star in that enclosing gloom. A text showed: GRT DNGER GET ARSE OUT PTR I turned off the phone. The screen went blank.

  Rosa was watching me. Around her the steady stream of white-robed women pushed past her, as they always did.

  “Get arse out,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He’s right.” I shook my head, trying to clear it. “I need to get out of here.”

  Rosa’s eyes narrowed.

  The others,
the women nearest me, reacted, too. Some of them turned to me, even breaking their stride, looking at me in a kind of mild dismay. Their reaction spread out farther, as each woman responded to what her neighbor was doing. It was as if I had detonated an invisible bomb down there, and ripples of dismay were spreading out around me.

  At the focus of all that, I felt ashamed. “I’m sorry,” I said helplessly.

  Rosa moved closer to me and put a hand on my shoulder. At that touch the posture of the strangers around us relaxed a little. There were even smiles. I felt a kind of relief, a forgiveness. I wanted to be accepted here, I realized; I couldn’t bear the thought of exclusion from this close, touching group.

  “It’s okay,” said Rosa. “You don’t have to go. I can sort everything out. Tell me where your hotel is — did you say it was near the Forum? I’ll call them—”

  But I stuck to my thought of Peter. “Get arse out, get arse out.” I repeated it over and over, an absurd mantra. “Let me go, Rosa.”

  “All right,” she said, forcing a smile. “You need a little time. That’s okay.” She led me down the corridor. A part of me was glad to get away from the little knot of bystanders who had seen what I had done, who knew how I had betrayed them; I was glad to walk away from my shame. “Take all the time you want,” Rosa said soothingly. “We’ll always be here. I’ll be here. You know that.”

  “Get arse out,” I mumbled.

  We came at last to the steel door of a modern high-speed lift. We rode up in silence, Rosa still watching me; in her eyes there was something of the pressure of the gaze of those deep Crypt dwellers, their mute disappointment.

  As we rose I’ll swear my ears popped.